It seems as though whenever black folks do something wrong, everyone hears about it. If gang violence heats up in America's inner cities, for example, you can bet it'll be front-page news. Unacceptably high dropout rates? Yep, you can read all about it, and even hear Bill Cosby weigh in on how the African American community presumably doesn't value education anymore. Drugs, crime, out-of-wedlock childbirth? Yes, yes, and more yes, as the press never seems to tire of bringing us a steady drumbeat of negativity when it comes to people of color. Local television news is notoriously bad about this: blanketing the first 5-10 minutes of each newscast with crime stories, which, according to several national studies over-represent blacks as perpetrators, relative to the share of crime actually committed by African Americans.
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So here are some of the facts, compiled by CDC in 2005, and which would make news, in a media culture concerned about truth, and committed to challenging public misperceptions--which is to say, in a media very much unlike the one we have now:
-- White youth are 2.3 times more likely than black youth to drive drunk*
-- White males are a third more likely than black males to have carried a weapon in the past month (31.4 percent vs. 23.7) and fifty percent more likely to have taken a weapon to school (10.1 vs. 6.8);
-- Although black and white youth are equally likely to have tried cigarettes, whites are twice as likely to smoke currently (26 vs. 13 percent), and 3.3 times more likely to smoke at least a half-pack a day (11.7 vs. 3.5 percent);
-- Although white and black youth are roughly equally likely to have tried alcohol, white youth are fifty percent more likely to drink currently (46 percent vs. 31 percent), and nearly three times as likely to engage in episodic binge drinking (defined as having five or more drinks at a time, more than once a month). Indeed thirty percent of white youth have engaged in such heavy drinking, while only eleven percent of black youth have, meaning that white youth are nearly as likely to have binged more than once in the past month, as black youth are to have taken a drink at all;
-- Although there is no statistically significant difference between white and black youth when it comes to marijuana use, whites between grades 9-12 are almost 3.5 times more likely to have tried cocaine, twice as likely to be current coke users, twice as likely to have used inhalants, twice as likely to have used illegal steroids, 3.3 times as likely to have used hallucinogenic drugs, nearly four times as likely to have used methamphetamine, and slightly more likely to have used heroin or ecstasy. While it should be noted that only very small percentages of youth of any color have tried these harder drugs--obviously good news, and important to recognize, given the tendency to stereotype young people generally as irresponsible--the fact remains that blacks are typically the least likely to have done so.**
Read the rest at the site given.
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